by Tom Stobart
Malagas are drunk as dessert wines and may be of great age (I once was allowed a sip of one that was nearly two hundred years old). Malaga may be used as a flavouring in cooking – there are some dishes such as jamon dulce con vino de Malaga (sweet ham with Malaga wine) which demand it. The effect is somewhat similar to port but jamon dulce al porto is rather different. As there are some quite horrible ‘malagas’ on the market (although the name is now controlled), do not go for the cheapest on the grounds that it is only for cooking.
[Malaga – French: vin de Malaga German: Malagawein Italian: vino di Malaga Spanish: vino de Malaga]
MALDIVE FISH. Dried fish of several species, crumbled, pounded or powdered, is much used in the cooking of Sri Lanka. There is no substitute, although Bombay duck is often given as one. The importance of dried fish is one of several ways in which Sri Lankan cooking shows its connections with South East Asia.
MALIC ACID. A sharply sour organic acid which takes its name from the apple (Malus). Besides being present in sour apples, malic acid is an important acid in grapes, especially in those produced in the cooler and less sunny wine regions. The change from malic to the less sour lactic acid, which takes place in wine, is brought about by bacteria and is known as the malo-lactic fermentation. Malic acid can be bought as a white, crystalline powder and is occasionally used by those who make fruit wines.
MALLOW. Many members of the mallow family, even hollyhocks at a pinch, are edible. The leaves of various species of wild mallows are commonly eaten. In the Jordan valley, for instance, I had some as they are popular with Arab farmers, but they are not very enjoyable. The abelmusk (Hibiscus abelmoschus) is a musk-like flavouring seed. The *Jamaica flower, roselle or red sorrel (H. sabdariffa) is another interesting plant. Its deep red calices have a sharp, fruity flavour and are used in tarts and jams, and for refreshing drinks. The green leaves are also edible. Another mallow, abutilon (Abutilon esculentum and other species), has leaves that are used as a spinach; it is cultivated for this purpose in countries from India (ranghi) to Brazil. Melokhia or molokhia, a soup that is an Egyptian national dish, is made from the leaves of a mallow, Corchorus olitorius; dried melokhia leaves, which are obtainable from Greek shops, according to Claudia Roden in A Book of Middle Eastern Food (Penguin) are very acceptable in place of fresh ones. Other mallows are *Marsh mallow, *okra and cotton which is significant in cooking as the source of *cotton-seed oil.
[Mallow – French: mauve German: Malve, Pappelkrout Italian: malva Spanish: morado]
MALMSEY. See madeira.
MALT. Any cereal can be malted, but by ‘malt’ we understand malted barley unless otherwise specified. Malt is the raw material from which beer and malt *whisky are made.
In fresh grain, the food on which the tiny sprout will have to subsist when it starts life is stored in the form of starch. Once sprouting begins, enzymes (known generically as diastase) start to break down the starch into, mainly, maltose (a sugar) and dextrins (gums).To make malt, *barley (preferably a variety rich in starch) is first soaked in water for two days and then spread out to sprout, being kept moist and turned occasionally to prevent heating. After about a week – the time varies with the temperature, the variety of barley and its age – when the tiny first shoot is nearly, but not quite, as long as the grain, the barley is very gradually heated and dried, with the temperature rising over a period of several days. The final temperature is critical, determining the type of malt that is produced. After the rootlets have been rubbed off, the malted grain is stored for a week or so to mature and is then ready to be milled or crushed to grist for use.
The palest malt (lager malt) is heated to about 93°C (200°F). Higher temperatures will produce (in ascending order) pale malt, amber malt, crystal malt, brown malt, black malt and patent black malt, the last being a substance in which the sugars are charred – it was originally used only for colouring. Naturally, the flavour changes as the malt is heated and more and more of the enzymes are put out of action. Black malts have a burnt taste and are used for stouts. Crystal malt is toffee-coloured, has a strong flavour and contains quite a proportion of sweet, unfermentable dextrins which make it a popular addition to brown ales, as these need to be smooth and slightly sweet.
Before they can be used in fermentation, malts must be mashed to develop the sugars and extract them in solution. The grist of milled malt is mixed with warm water and kept at a suitable temperature. At 54°C (130°F) and a pH of 4.7, a maximum amount of malt sugar is formed, but if the temperature is increased to 65°C (149°F) and the acidity reduced to pH 5.7, the conditions favour maximum production of dextrins for the sweeter, more full-bodied beers. The temperature must be maintained for at least two hours, but longer times are usual in brewing.
The liquid which is filtered off is known as wort. This has to be boiled to sterilize it and to destroy the enzymes before the yeast is added for brewing beer. If wort is evaporated to a thick syrup by boiling under reduced pressure, the mixture of malt sugar, dextrins and flavour compounds is known as malt extract. The extract may also be dried. Extracts of the various types of malt can be bought from shops which specialize in materials for home-made beers and wines. A sweet, darkish malt extract is also sold in jars by chemists, though you have to be careful not to get the type mixed with cod-liver oil.
In cooking, malt was once added to various porridges and simple puddings for children and invalids. It was supposed to be especially effective in building up people with tuberculosis and other wasting diseases. Malt bread is a sticky, sweet, dark bread, often with currants, raisins and sultanas. As malt extract is sweet, and has a pleasant, distinctive taste, it is probably worth a little experiment.
Proprietary granary flour for breadmaking contains malted wheat kernels. Malted wheat-meal flour is sometimes to be found in health food stores. Malt is highly regarded in the bakery trade as a dough improver to improve volume, bloom, crust, etc.
[Malt – French: malt German: Malz Italian: malto Spanish: malta]
MALTOSE or malt sugar (C12H22O11) is a crystalline disaccharide *sugar which is the main sugar in malt and is also formed in the digestion of starch with enzymes produced by the salivary glands and, more importantly, the pancreas. Although it is not used in its pure form in the kitchen, it is of immense importance as it is keenly fermented by yeasts to produce alcohol (the basis of brewing) and carbon dioxide (which makes bread rise).
MALVASIA. See madeira.
MAMALIGA. See maize.
MANDARIN. See orange.
MANGANESE (Mn) is an unattractive grey metal which is an essential trace element in food but is toxic in any larger amount. Tea is particularly rich in manganese, containing from 150-1000 parts per million, depending on where it comes from. Cloves contain 450 ppm. Bran, wholemeal flour and liver are also common and good sources.
[Manganese – French: manganèse German: Mangan Italian: manganese Spanish: manganeso]
MANGE-TOUT. See peas.
MANGO (Mangifera indica). At their best, mangoes can well claim to be the world’s most delicious fruit, although another school of thought awards *mangosteens that place. A fine eating mango, such as the famous Alphonso variety, will have fine-textured, orange flesh surrounding a flattened central stone and enclosed in a leathery skin. The taste is acid-sweet and perfectly balanced, and the aroma is that of a pine wood in spring – if it is possible to describe at all the unique mango taste.
Such eating varieties are best chilled (they keep some days in the refrigerator).To eat a mango, cut off both sides of the fruit, on either side of the stone, and scoop the flesh out of the skin with a spoon. Afterwards, strip the skin off the remaining central part and suck the stone clean. (This is messy, but mangoes are so delicious that even the most fastidious will not mind being smeared with juice. After eating a good mango, you need a bath.) At the other end of the scale, there are semi-wild varieties with small, fibrous fruits that taste strongly of turpentine. Intermediate types make specially delicious pickle or chutney.
There is also a tremendous range of stringy but juicy mangoes which are supposed to be sucked, but these are often over-sweet. People who say that mangoes are over-rated have almost always got hold of a poor variety or of one grown in unsuitable soil or climate – many such inferior mangoes are produced.
The mango is a tree of the Indian region and has certainly been in cultivation there for over 4000 years. Alexander the Great’s men saw trees growing in the Indus Valley in 327 BC. In the last few hundred years, mangoes have been introduced to suitably warm climates all round the world: Florida, California, Queensland, the Azores, the Canary Islands during the 19th century, for instance, and southern Italy early in the last century. Countries which now grow and export them include Egypt, Israel and Kenya. Some mangoes were even grown under glass in England in 1690, and one tree fruited in Kew Gardens in 1818. In fact, mango trees can exist in a wide variety of conditions as long as they have sun and no frost during the flowering season, but those fruiting in any but perfect climates will rarely give good table fruits.
Commercially, mangoes are always picked just before they are ripe; if wrapped carefully and chilled at 5-10°C (41-50°F), they can be shipped by air as far as from India to Britain. Mangoes are best placed carefully in straw to ripen. Once ripe, they will keep for up to ten days at room temperature and up to two weeks in the refrigerator. Unfortunately, mangoes are expensive; good ones are expensive even where they are grown.
The mango belongs to the same family (Anocardiaceae) as the cashew and pistachio nuts. Mango trees grow to an enormous size, often covering 30 m (100 ft) with the dense shade of their elongated, dark green, shiny leaves. The tree is evergreen and characteristic of the landscape over large parts of India, where it is of great economic importance.
Mango *chutney, in India, may be made fresh from raw ground mango, herbs and spices, but sweet cooked mango chutney is a common commercial item elsewhere. In Britain, it is often eaten with cold meat, and goes with cheese in pub sandwiches. A typical commercial recipe is as follows.
Sweet Mango Chutney
Take ripe but firm mangoes. Wash, peel and slice. For 1 kg (2¼ lb) of sliced mango, add 1 kg (2 lb) sugar, 50 g (2 oz) salt and a very little water, boil for a short time until the mango is just tender. Put 25 g (1 oz) mixed spice (equal weight of black pepper, cumin, cloves, cinnamon and cardamom), 15 g (½ oz) ground chilli, 100 g (4 oz) bruised ginger, 50 g (2 oz) chopped onion, and 15 g (½ oz) crushed garlic in a muslin bag and add to the boiling mango. Add 150 ml (¼ pt) vinegar – the quantity needed to achieve a good balance will depend on the sweetness of the mangoes and the strength of the vinegar. Adjust the salt if necessary. Cook for five minutes or until the desired consistency is reached. Bottle and seal.
Dried mango powder is known in India as amchur or amchoor (am means mango in North India). It is an ingredient needed for certain Indian dishes and can be bought at most shops that specialize in Indian products.
Mango leather (amavat) is made in India when there is a glut of mangoes. The juice is squeezed on trays or plates and put in the hot sun to dry. As the juice dries, more is squeezed out until a leathery material about 1 cm (½ in) thick has been made. This is usually rolled and cut into strips. It makes a nourishing sweet. Commercially, mango leather is made by adding a trace of potassium metabisulphite (or *Campden tablets) to the juice and then drying it at 60-65°C (140-150°F) on oiled wooden trays.
Mango pickle, of varying degrees of hotness, is a popular accompaniment to curries in India and quite a different article to the mango chutney used in the West, being salty, sour, spicy, and not at all sweet. A defining recipe is as follows:
Mango Pickle
Use unripe but plump green mangoes. Wash and slice them and put the slices temporarily into brine to prevent them blackening. Drain before using. For each 1 kg (2¼ lb) of mango slices, mix in 250 g (9 oz) salt. Stand them in the sun for 3-5 days depending on the weather. Now add 25 g (1 oz) each of ground, very lightly roasted fenugreek seed and bruised nigella seed, and the same quantity of ground turmeric, aniseed and black pepper, with enough mustard oil to cover the mango surfaces and lubricate the mass. Stir well and pack tightly in jars, filling each with oil to cover.
It is claimed that some varieties of mango are excellent when canned, but most people who have enjoyed mangoes where they grow will probably agree that canned ones are a very poor substitute. They do not change and take on a new dimension as do peaches, but rather acquire an over-sweet and sickly aspect. Canned mango pulp may be used to make mango fool and mango leather. Canned mango juice is also available.
[Mango – French: mangue German: Mango Italian: mango Spanish: mango, manguey]
MANGOSTEEN. Tropical fruit from a tree, Garcinia mangostana, that is native to Malaysia and rarely, if ever, met with outside the tropics. It has a tough brownish rind around delicious white flesh which is divided into segments. It is eaten raw but the related *kokum is used in Indian cooking.
MANIOC. See cassava.
MANTIS SHRIMP (Squilla mantis) is a curious crustacean with front legs superficially like those of a praying mantis and a general shape like a shrimp or lobster with a rather large abdomen. Mantis shrimps, which reach 25 cm (10 in) long and lurk in mud or sand below low-tide mark, are a good ingredient for fish soup. They can also be boiled and dealt with much in the same way as prawns (the tails may be served cold with the upper part of the shell removed to expose the flesh).They are popular in Italy, particularly in Romagna and the Veneto, and elsewhere around the Mediterranean. A related species, S. empusa, is found on the East coast of the US.
[Mantis shrimp – French: squille Italian: pannocchia cannocchia Spanish: galera]
MANZANILLA. See sherry.
MAPLE SYRUP and MAPLE SUGAR are the boiled-down sap of the Rock or Sugar maple (Acer saccharum) and of the Black maple (A. nigrum). These grow in south-eastern Canada and the north-eastern US, from Pennsylvania north and west to Wisconsin.
The early colonists were taught by the Indians to tap the maples and to evaporate the sap to syrup or sugar. While the materials now used may be different (with galvanized tin or plastic replacing wood for the pails, and metal spiles instead of hand-carved sumac ones), the ‘sugaring-off’ ritual is relatively unchanged.
The sap starts to rise in late February or early March, when the worst of winter is over. This is the beginning of sugaring or sapping time; the farmer or syrup-maker bores a hole about 1 cm (½ in) wide and 5 cm (2 in) deep into the trunk of the maple, where the sap runs, and inserts the spile, hanging a loosely covered pail under the spile to catch the sap. Suitable maples have either trunks at least 25 cm (10 in) in diameter or are 40 or more years old. Large trees may make up to five buckets.
Until about mid-April, the buckets are emptied regularly and the watery, virtually tasteless sap is evaporated to syrup or sugar in huge pans over a fierce fire. On average, it takes about nine gallons of sap to produce one of syrup. As a single tree produces about 8-16 Imperial gallons (10-20 US gallons or 37-75 It) of sap, maple syrup and maple sugar can only emerge as expensive products. A further reduction by a quarter makes the syrup into maple sugar, which in Colonial days was a general sweetener and accepted in part-payment of wages, but today is just a moulded candy.
While maple syrup and sugar are delicious in a very sweet way and the syrup is often the best part of a plate of pancakes or waffles, a heavy hand with the syrup in cooking will overwhelm everything else in the dish with a cloying sweetness. Maple syrup can be used to glaze carrots, at the end of cooking; it can be mixed with mustard and vinegar, instead of molasses, for the sweet coating on baked ham; used to flavour mousses and ice-cream, or poured over ice-cream and other puddings.
A traditional use of maple syrup is to turn it into a candy by pouring it on to snow. Boil up a quantity of maple syrup until it reaches the soft-ball stage (when a bit dropped into cold water forms a ball, but loses its shape when touched).You will need a patch of packed clean snow out of doors or a baking tin full of
it in the kitchen. Pour the hot, thickened syrup on the snow in swirls and designs; it will immediately harden into a chewy candy. For a harder sweet, boil the syrup longer before pouring.
The quality of maple syrup is variable, and a liking for the best pure maple syrup is usually coupled with a dislike of any of the combinations of it with other syrups (corn syrup, honey, etc.) that are commercially available. Pure maple syrup is designated by a maple leaf on the label. Synthetic maple syrup flavouring added to sugar syrup is a common but crude substitute for the real thing.
[Maple syrup – French: sirop d’érable German: Ahornsaft Italian: sciroppo d’acero Spanish: amilbar de arce]
MARASCHINO. See cherry, fruit brandy, liqueurs.
MARC or eau-de-vie de marc. This is not strictly speaking a *brandy, although they are often confused. For instance, dop brandy (Cape smoke) is a South African marc. Brandy is, or should be, made from wine, but marc is made by fermenting the mess of sludge, skins, pips and stalks left over after the juice for wine-making has been pressed out. The marc must therefore always be highly rectified to get rid of the methyl alcohol and other hangover-promoting congenerics. lt is less delicate and less expensive than brandy and varies greatly from region to region. Some marcs are excellent and are much drunk in France; others are firewater. In local recipes, eau-de vie de marc is sometimes specified and it should really, if one is sufficiently fussy, be a marc from the region of the recipe. Other countries distil marc. In Italy, the equivalent is *grappa; in Portugal, bagaceira; and in Germany, Tresterbrantwein.
MARGARINE. Margarine was invented in France during the 1860s by Mèges-Mouriés, a chemist, who patented it towards the end of the decade. At first, it was made largely of beef suet and skimmed milk and was nothing like the sophisticated product of the present day. Although it was variously called ‘oleo’, ‘oleo margarine’ or ‘butterine’, the Margarine Act of 1887 made the name ‘margarine’ compulsory in Britain and put an end to confusing designations. Today, margarine is almost universally regarded not as a cheap butter substitute but as a product in its own right.